All my life, I've been haunted by a specter — the specter of the French woman.

French women, we're reliably told, don't get fat; they're better parents; they're "more tolerant" of sexual harassment, to quote TheNew York Times; they age gracefully; they have "seductive style." Typing the phrase "French woman" into Amazon yields results like All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women. If you want to make a joke about "sexy depression," you go straight to the French.

No salvation from digging further into the past, either — Olivia de Havilland was feeling inferior to the French as early as 1962, when she wrote Every Frenchman Has One, her breezy memoir of marrying Pierre Galante and moving to Paris. And then of course — thanks, Simone de Beauvoir — a French woman wrote the book on being a woman. It's really a large burden for everyone else to struggle under; enough to make you pour yourself a glass of wine and bite moodily into a baguette spread with chèvre.

The gist of these stereotypes, I think, is that French women, as imagined by their American counterparts, are natural. They're sophisticated, but simple; emotional, but not needy; thin, without dieting. Their hair is perfect, but messy. They don't worry about themselves. They're unflappable.

As easy as this stereotype is to mock, the truth is, I'm not entirely immune. For instance, I use a whole array of French skin care products. If I were asked why, I would say that I just assumed they'd produce more results with less effort — that any of the other options on the table would require me to be more personally virtuous (drink less wine, more water) or put in more work (various 10-step skin care routines). When I get a haircut, I produce photos of Françoise Hardy, French singer and style icon, precisely because her haircut is low effort but looks reliably good (particularly if I use a conditioner that is — wait for it — French).

So inspired, I picked up Hardy's memoir, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, recently translated into English by Jon E. Graham and published by Feral House. I had an idea that it, too, would be a light-hearted account of what it was like to be talented, beautiful, and have perfect hair, to be adored by Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Thus I was unprepared for its opening chapter, which began:

I was born at 9:30 in the evening during an air raid alert ... My mother often told me that I cried every night during my first month of life, but she had never come to comfort me. She was proud of herself for never giving in to what she felt were my whims. She boasted that after a month I understood and stopped crying. Today I believe what I understood was this: The more you cry out, the more you are ignored. You must hold your tears back and never ask anything of anyone. [The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles]

The rest of the memoir continued in this vein. Hardy's childhood? Rough. Her singing? She never seems confident about it, writing far more eloquently about its problems than its strengths. Her looks? She grew up with a grandmother who criticized her frequently and she seems to have internalized this to the point of writing frankly about her bad clothes and her defective looks; later in the memoir, she worries she's aging badly. Her hair? Well, the hair emerged intact. But this woman, who for so long had been to me the epitome of cool detachment, turned out to be, well, a human being, complete with her own neuroses about other, more put-together women, with her own difficult relationships and history. And while the French woman, presumably, can't die, only age gracefully into nothing, Hardy, now in her 70s, talks in interviews about how she sings about "death in a very symbolic and even positive way."

Hardy has been open about disliking the word "icon," stating it makes her feel "as if you're talking about someone else." Much of the coverage of her mentions her shyness. When I go back to look at her pictures, I now see that the cool aesthetic I so admired (and still admire) was the result of her holding herself back, just enough from the camera. What drew me to her wasn't really the great hair, but the sense of privacy she projected. Not that she was natural and unaffected, but that she was self-possessed.

The French woman is an American fantasy — one that says the secret to being happy, successful, and beautiful is simply to relax and let it happen, that femininity (whatever that is) can be achieved merely by jettisoning self-consciousness. It's your choice to stress about the day-to-day details of life that are causing you to be unhappy, to age badly, to require a facelift, or whatever it is that the books assure us French women don't need to do. It's not, of course, that American women should add "insufficiently stressed" to the list of the things they're stressed about, but rather that they've created an ideal that is also an inherent reproach. No matter how hard you work, you can't reach it, because, after all, its essence is not working.

What's the antidote here? The fix to the larger systems at play are beyond my reach, but one suggestion might be to pick up The Despair of Monkeys, slip on some headphones, and listen to Françoise Hardy's latest album, Personne d'autre. "I'll try to pretend / I'm not sad there alone," she sings on "You're My Home."

The fiction of the French woman was that she never had to try to pretend. The liberating truth is that she's always had to try as much as anyone else.

When I signed up for Curious Cat, a social media platform that lets you ask and answer anonymous questions, one of the first questions I got was why I signed up at all. I mean this literally: On the platform, someone asked me this.

It's a fair question. And it raises a larger one: What do we hope to get out of social media at all?

For many of us, the simple answer is we want to be known.

I often think of the country song "Unknown," by Chely Wright. Wright spends most of the song listing small facts about herself ("I'm bad with names, but remember faces"), and then breaks out in the chorus with:

Unknown / I don't want to be unknown / The little things that make me who I am / I need to share / I need to know that someone cares [Chely Wright]

No, it's not great literature. But it made an impression on me — I don't want to be unknown either.

The road to being known is tricky. For instance, I like that song, but I normally wouldn't express that by straightforwardly appreciating it, by sending it to a friend, or admitting publicly to any degree of personal identification. These are admissions far too dangerous to make to anyone. Back in the early internet days, if I were to admit to listening to the song at all, it would probably have been through utilizing the "currently listening" function on my LiveJournal, where reflections on my life would be punctuated, at the bottom, by a little icon indicating what I was feeling, a song, and (if you cleverly repurposed the box meant to display your location) whatever you happened to be reading.

LiveJournals were an elaborate code: You'd rather eat your heart than tell people how you were feeling. But you still wanted to be seen and known, so you'd put in clues with a hefty amount of plausible deniability, answered quizzes with answers that pointed toward hidden depths, designed your visual "look" to indicate precisely what flavor of sad or thoughtful you were.

Sharing bits of yourself on social media was an invitation for others to ask questions.

After LiveJournal's era came to a close and its users migrated onto other platforms — Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, mostly — I began to notice the various platforms that existed explicitly to get people to ask you questions, almost always pseudonymously. Tumblr made question-asking a feature. There were "ask me anything" threads on Reddit. There was Formspring; there was ASKfm. And, most recently, there's Curious Cat.

My somewhat sketchy research indicates Curious Cat is used primarily by three types of people: left-wing nerds, religious nerds, and people trying to get off. (The last type is inevitable, though I'm going to admit that the extremely tedious question-and-answer format makes the platform seem pretty ill-suited to this particular use. Still, where there's a will, there's a way.)

For the nerds, the delight in being asked to explain your opinions at length is almost self-explanatory. But much like LiveJournal functioned as an excuse to hint at emotions without really exposing them, the platform opens the door to being asked lots of questions about your skincare routine, your relationship status, the sorts of things you like to cook — in short, the same sorts of fairly banal subjects that characterize Chely Wright's song. How do you drink your coffee? Do you like to sing to yourself? What's your morning routine?

On one level, the desire to ask and the desire to answer these questions is plainly ridiculous, even a tad pathological. If you have a real opinion to deliver, shouldn't you be trying to get published? If you want people to talk to you about whether or not you drink coffee black, well, why? It's harder to imagine a bigger waste of time or admission of neediness.

Still, when Curious Cat came along, after some deliberation, I bit the bullet. Some of the questions were creepy, some were a bit much ("what are our obligations to other people?"), some were boring. It turned out there were certain kinds of questions people tended to ask over and over. Was it narcissistic? Definitely. Was I having a blast? Certainly.

Twitter was much-mocked in its early days for being about your breakfast — but in a sense that's really what all social media is about, or at least is about until its larger, more monetizable aspects begin to take over. That was one promise of social media: You could bring your mundane self, your daily routines, your most boring preferences, and somebody was going to be interested in them. People like sharing their daily routine, how they exercise, what they're cooking, what they look like, how they're dressed. It's dull, it's soothing; it's life.

We like to do this in part because that's how you restore the aspects of in-person friendships to virtual ones. But we also do it because we're lonely. Lots of us get up in the morning and wonder if anybody would notice if we didn't. Lots of us wonder how many of the people in our lives know us very well, how many of them would want to, and how many of them would care to know us if they did. That they turn for some kind of reassurance to the anonymous arms of strangers isn't that surprising.

Who else has a desire to know you that you can trust as sincere, except those you don't know at all?

"Men who are constantly trying to move things forward are exhausting in a way I find hard to articulate," a friend once wrote to me. "Like you never get to fall in love on your own." She wasn't referring to the #MeToo movement, or the gruesomely described date between "Grace" and Aziz Ansari, but her words have stuck with me, because she put her finger on one of the many costs our sexual mores impose on women: Desire.

#MeToo isn't anyone's first hashtag rodeo. Well, I suppose actually it must be somebody's, since new people continue, frighteningly, to be born, to log online, and to share their lives there. But that aside, like #YesAllWomen before it, #MeToo is borne of a collective optimism that male violence against women is a problem stemming from male ignorance, to be solved through a collective baring of scars. And like #YesAllWomen, or for that matter, SlutWalk or Take Back the Night or any number of mass initiatives, #MeToo has also produced its own women's counter-reaction, amply represented by writers like Bari Weiss and Daphne Merkin (in TheNew York Times), Caitlin Flanagan (in TheAtlantic), and (eventually, and already somewhat notoriously) Katie Roiphe in Harper's.

For Weiss, Merkin, and Flanagan, the looming danger of #MeToo is that it emphasizes a woman's vulnerability over her agency, and importantly, her sexual freedom. And being free means accepting consequences, such as a bad date in which a man's sexual behavior crosses a line. The freedom women can exercise in these situations is saying no, and "[taking] the risk that comes with it," as Merkin puts it. "If [a date] pressures you to do something you don't want to do," writes Weiss, "use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs, and walk out his door." And Flanagan looks toward the women's magazines of her youth, which emphasized that women always had the right to decline an unwanted advance.

But what kind of freedom is saying "no"? In the already much-dissected account of the date between the anonymous "Grace" and Aziz Ansari, "Grace" does indeed say no, both verbally and not. But her options are either to leave or take her lumps — that she might have wanted to have sex with Ansari, but in a way that incorporated her own desires or indeed even left room for her to speak, isn't on the table. Female sexual agency exists only in deciding what any given woman is willing to submit to, not what she wants.

Why don't these women know they are prey? This is the irritated question that runs through the reactions of Weiss, Merkin, Flanagan. The simple answer is that these women aren't prey, that they refuse this designation. A rabbit isn't exercising any kind of freedom in merely saying, "Not today, Mr. Wolf," or selecting between a wolf and a rather tame dog. And if the relationship between men and women really were that of a rabbit and carnivore, women could really be excused in using just about any method to level the playing field.

But it's not, because women, much like their male counterparts, feel desire, even unwise desires or desires that seem to overthrow reason; and I don't think that desire is the desire to be consumed and digested (at least for most of them — it takes all kinds). Women fall in love, experience sexual humiliation and rejection, and, contra Andrew Sullivan, the ambient sexual itch we call "horniness" is something they feel too. The problem is that you can't say yes in a world in which your yes is presumed until someone gets a no, just as you can't say no and be understood if no is the only word you're permitted. You can't express desire to a partner who can understand your desire only in terms of acquiescence.

One casualty, not the most important but assuredly real, of men's predation is women's desire. In her book Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin — an author and a book both not known for a rosy understanding of heterosexual relations — writes that "women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men," that they hold on to "visions of a humane sensuality based in equality." She immediately goes on to deflate these dreams, pointing out that they do not "amount to much in real life with real men."

Still, I remember the shock of reading them for the first time; in the middle of such a fierce and upsetting polemic, the presence of this unfilled and graceful hope: that women can not only be regarded by men as human beings, but that men can act as human beings too. Beyond the rabbit and the wolf, there's a whole world. Isn't it time we went there?

It's safe to say Kazuo Ishiguro was, if not quite a Bob Dylan–level dark horse, not really on anyone's radar to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Neither the Rumpus nor the New Republic put Ishiguro in their lists of Nobel hopefuls, for instance. And though Ishiguro is an artist who has — and has earned — an enormous amount of readerly goodwill, his last two books, Nocturnes and The Buried Giant, received mixed reviews. Most of his popular fame rests on two books: The Remains of the Day, narrated by a butler whose beloved former employer turns out to have been a Nazi sympathizer, and Never Let Me Go, a story about boarding school children who turn out to be clones grown and raised for eventual organ harvesting. Perhaps not coincidentally, both have been adapted into movies.

It would be a little absurd to use the occasion of a Nobel Prize to claim the winner gets no respect. On the other hand, Ishiguro's work is often deliberately self-effacing. He rarely goes in for stylistic flourishes, and the mood of his work is usually (though not always) quiet, even mundane. So while Ishiguro is not precisely underrated, let's call him underestimated. Even in his more self-consciously ambitious work, he's not really drawing attention to himself.

So what is it about his work that merits this kind of prestige? That "in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" is the official explanation. As explanations go, it's a little mysterious.

Though The Buried Giant deserved the mixed reviews (I gave it one myself), its chosen conceit contains the answer to this question. The book is about a mythical England which is under a fog of forgetting. Lifting the fog, it eventually becomes clear, will mean remembering terrible things. Some of those terrible things were done by the very characters we are following through the book, who, advanced in years and under the spell of the fog, have little idea what they have done. What also becomes clear is that remembering the past will cause, in turn, terrible bloodshed.

You would expect this kind of story to progress a few different ways. One is to pen a story on the virtues of forgetting — of moving on, letting the past stay buried. Another is to praise remembering: justice and hard truths at all costs. Or you could try to thread the needle such that you try to write a story about forgiveness that is not ultimately about forgetting. Instead, Ishiguro chooses not to choose. The guilt of his characters is a simple fact, one that will be made right neither by forgiveness nor by bloodshed, one that ultimately cannot be solved by forgetting.

Only a few of Ishiguro's characters are what you might call "bad people" — malicious, predatory, or cruel. They do exist: Christopher, the protagonist of When We Were Orphans, eventually discovers that his life was financed by his mother's rape at the hands of a warlord named Wang Ku. Wang Ku is certainly a villain; but the book focuses more on Christopher himself, who asks his mother, at the end of the book, for forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what? It's a good question. ("Did you say forgive [him]? Whatever for?" asks his mother, who cannot recognize him.) Christopher hasn't done anything wrong, exactly; he didn't know he was profiting from evil. The entire book tracks his journey to uncover the mystery of his past. At the same time, he's guilty. So is Stevens, the butler who narrates The Remains of the Day, for the work he does for the fascist he adores. So is Masuji Ono of An Artist of the Floating World, who created propaganda for Japan in World War II (among other failures).

Novels about ordinary people who profit from evil — because they themselves are unimportant, because the ask isn't high, because they've willfully forgotten or been shielded from the truth — what could capture more clearly the situation of most of Ishiguro's readers? Certainly they can find themselves entangled in this situation wherever they turn. You don't need to look for anything big. To pick one example: If you are reading this story on an iPhone, it's easy enough to find a story about the conditions under which your phone was produced.

So if you want to know why you ought to read Ishiguro — and why he deserves to be highlighted, to you, at this particular moment — one answer is that he is the novelist of guilt. The guilt is unavoidable; it's something you acquire by being alive. It's not dischargeable; you'll always have done what you did. And yet because of its very universality, it's something you cannot shrug off. It's not enough to say that everybody fails, takes short cuts, or does wrong things. It won't free you to say you're not the only guilty party.

And what will? Probably nothing. Ishiguro's books aren't solutions or how-to guides. His depiction of rituals of forgiveness and penance in The Buried Giant are deeply skeptical. What matters is that you are guilty. However you choose to acknowledge or avoid it, that's the truth. And it always has been.

Almost exactly three years ago, a sophomore, Hannah Graham, disappeared from the University of Virginia. In the weeks following her disappearance, Camille Paglia decided to weigh in at Time. College women were naïve about the world; they didn't understand evil or violence. "The price of women's modern freedoms," she wrote, "is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense."

Paglia's article represents the extreme end of a genre you could call "Real Talk, Ladies!" It tells college-aged women not to drink, to scrutinize their actions for possible sexual overtones, and not to trust their friends. It often appears in venues where it's hard to imagine college students reading it. (Who, exactly, are the college freshmen looking for "straight talk" from TheWall Street Journal?) Any ugly consequences are as natural as gravity — yes, you can have a drink or go to a party, but if you do, you've opened yourself up to the consequences. So don't come crying to me when you're raped.

College activists made campus sexual assault a national issue, but I'm not sure that's why the issue stayed there. In the weird world of the American opinion page, the university has come to stand for "community." If we want to talk about threats to freedom of speech, we don't pick the legislation in North Carolina making it legal to hit protesters with your car, but an op-ed in a student paper. And when we want to talk about sexual assault — whether we're picking up Laura Kipnis's Unwanted Advances ("listen up, ladies!") or Vanessa Grigoriadis's Blurred Lines ("I'm listening, ladies") — we talk about campuses, even though women on college campuses aren't more at risk than their peers. So college sexual assault stands in for sexual assault generally, even though any reform of Title IX itself will only affect a small part of the population.

There are a lot of possible answers — ranging from the crass ("college women are hot") to the darkly meritocratic ("women who don't go to college don't deserve the attention") to the boring ("students tend to stay engaged on this issue after they graduate"). Here's mine: Campus sexual assault is part of a coming of age story, or rather, these days, it's part of a story about failing to come of age.

In this story, what's at stake isn't consent so much as a girl's expectation about the way the world works. If we focus on the college girl as the typical sexual assault victim, it's at least in part because her anger is deemed a failure of her education. She's a stupid girl, lacking even in the common sense not to get raped. She didn't think the situation through. She's not learning from her experience, or at least not learning to accept it.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say "it has been ever thus." But this story has been running thus since at least the late '70s, when one of the first sexual assault cases to employ Title IX, Alexander v. Yale, was taking place. Alexander v. Yale was, as these cases tend to be, a media event, covered glibly in Time ("Bod and Man at Yale") and sympathetically in The Nation. It also received a dry dismissal from Russell Baker in The New York Times, who asked why "the problem" was not "solved handily with a private initiative":

A robust father might have appeared carrying a shotgun at the office of one of the more obnoxious offenders. A large brother or boyfriend might have blackened his eye. A small woman might have cooled his passion with a hat pin, and only slightly clever small woman might have crushed his ego with a few simple words thrust neatly into his vulnerable asininity. [The New York Times]

Instead, Baker lamented, "to cope with the problem which her mother could solve in an afternoon, [a young woman] requires the aid of lawyers, a judge, a jury, witnesses, transcripts, three years of litigation, and two appeals courts." Your mother could hack it, so why can't you?

Almost 20 years later, the writer Katie Roiphe would go on to frame the difference as one between the tough feminism of her mother and the shrill feminism of her peers. Even Kipnis, in her recent book, fondly recalls a story of her mother being chased around a desk by her boss and shrugging it off. The generational refusal to take your lumps becomes a crisis. What's wrong with these women? They want so much, they make so many mistakes, and, above all, they're so weak.

But as the backlash cycle itself goes to show, these angry young women do have mothers, both intellectually and politically. The intergenerational conflict is real, but so is the existence of a solidarity that stretches across the generations.

Every stupid girl is taking a step into the world that could be. For that world, they're willing to risk a lot. They believe that people can be better; they believe we can expect more from each other. That's as much real talk as anybody could need. I hope we continue to live in a world full of women — in the university and outside it — stupid enough to keep asking for more, stupid enough not to accept things the way they are, and stupid enough to care.

You don't need to read Hillary Clinton's new book, What Happened. In fact, you probably shouldn't. I won't.

Certain figures could release a book of blank pages and still launch a thousand think pieces. Clinton is one of them. Ivanka Trump is another. The world is already knee-deep in clever takedowns, pieces about what they "mean," and parodies of their books. You could read Hard Choices (Clinton's 2014 memoir) and then read False Choices (a collection of response essays) and then read all the reviews of both collections. By this point you would have taken the first step into becoming an expert in Clinton Studies. But — here's the thing — why?

Clinton's book isn't blank, of course. Its 500-odd pages are covered with words, some of which are already circulating on Twitter, all of which will be minutely picked over. She's still angry at Bernie Sanders, and seems to blame him for her loss. For those who have yet to leave the 2016 Democratic primary, her book provides yet another way not to leave it. You can even join Verrit, the "media startup for Clinton voters," to revisit old wounds together there.

But whatever you want to read this book for, chances are, there's something else that does it better. If you want to read a history of the 2016 election, you'll probably want to read a book that covers the subject from a wider standpoint. If you're wondering how to win other elections, Clinton probably has little to tell you. And if you want to educate yourself on one of the many very pressing material concerns that the country faces, you'll want a different sort of book altogether. There are books about climate change and there are books about health care and there are books about prisons and there are books about the opiate epidemic. You (probably) aren't going to learn anything from What Happened about these issues. You (almost certainly) aren't going to learn about how to make them an effective part of a political message because if Clinton could have done that, well, she would have.

There's another motive here, which is the simple taste for gossip. This is a respectable motive. And if you want to read Clinton's perspective, or at least the sanitized version of Clinton's perspective, What Happened is your best bet. So, one exception: If politicians are the particular brand of celebrity you follow, by all means, read What Happened. No one's above gossip. Everyone loves rubbernecking at a disaster.

But, at the risk of commenting in detail about a book I have pledged not to read: In one of the leaked excerpts from What Happened, Clinton accuses Sanders of promising Americans a "free pony" without explaining how to pay for it. No one wants to be the bad guy saying free ponies are unachievable, but, in her version of the story, that's the role Sanders stuck Clinton with.

Granted: Politics does require more than just promising free ponies. But you do want to persuade people you can make their lives better, and not just that you can keep their lives from getting worse. The opposition to a reality TV presidency that has the best chance of breaking through is one that makes this point simply and well. Getting immersed in political figures as personalities, feeling their grudges as your grudges and their lives as your lives, is the opposite of what's called for. And sometimes, that free pony is not only achievable, but desperately needed.

So whether you read What Happened or not, here's a plea: Read something about a real problem. National Read a Book Day has come and gone, so let's call this Read Any Other Book Day. For instance: I just spent a very good evening with Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends, a reflection about her experiences interviewing refugee children. It was certainly a timely and sensitively written book, with sharp criticisms of Obama-era policies as well as a despairing post-election coda. Toward the end, Luiselli writes:

The United States is a country full of holes. … But it's also a place full of individuals who, out of a sense of duty toward other people, perhaps, are willing to fill those holes in one by one. There are lawyers and activists who work tirelessly to help communities that aren't their own; there are students who, though not at all privileged, are willing to dedicate their time to those even less privileged than themselves. [Tell Me How It Ends]

The helpers Luiselli encounters won't be able to fill in every hole. Her book is appreciative of the work of private organizations while also drawing attention to their limits. But as her students point out to her, "we gotta turn all our emotional shit into political capital."

Clinton is, at least some of the time, a powerful symbol. And symbols — as we see from the recent debates over Confederate monuments — do matter. But they can matter too much, overshadowing what they're meant to represent. I've read so many pieces on the meaning of Clinton, from her historical position to the white suit she wore to accept her nomination. She's a compelling dramatic figure, almost tragic in her way. I'd read a novel about her, certainly. But Clinton doesn't mean much of anything at all.

And the solutions to political troubles, whatever they may be, won't be found by dedicating still more time to decoding her.

It's hard out there for a book critic. If your author of choice has little social purpose, how can you convince a reader to even read a review, let alone pick up one of their books? Luxuriating in the uselessness of literature isn't an option, and reviewers don't have the luxury of believing their subject to be a pop art form, so populist appeal is out too. You could always take the memoir route: "How a book saved/changed my life." But if you don't want to do that, there's another compelling hook: Claim the author is forgotten. If he or more likely she is little-known, "read little, if at all," and so on, then the purpose of a review is self-evident. You're rescuing an author from the dead, isn't that enough?

Whatever the bar is for being forgotten, it's safe to say that it's not very high. Authors can present themselves as champions of forgotten writers because just about everything can be cast as obscure. You're not going to buy Adorno at an airport bookstore, so the Frankfurt School is forgotten. David Foster Wallace didn't talk about Henry James, so Henry James is forgotten. But the label "forgotten" tends, in my experience at least, to be applied most liberally to women writers, particularly the kind put into print by feminist publishing outfits such as Virago, Persephone Books, or the Dorothy Project.

Take Barbara Pym, an English novelist who wrote delightful and bleak domestic comedies and who is in the curious position of being remembered mostly for being forgotten. In his recent tribute to her in TheNew York Times, Matthew Schneier puts it right out there: Barbara Pym is "forever being forgotten, and forever revived."

I'm not sniping here at Schneier, whose piece is a fine introduction to an author worth reading. But the facts on the ground don't quite support this claim. In 2016, I wrote a tribute to Pym myself. In 2015, Hannah Rosefield sang her praises in TheNew Yorker. She's been written about affectionately in the same timespan in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. 2014's a wash, but 2013 was Pym's centenary and produced several pieces — this one, for example. People have been doing this, in fact, since 1971. Pym even gets a chapter in Laura Shapiro's recent What She Ate — right between Eva Braun and Helen Gurley Brown. A conference of Pym fans meets once a year in two different countries. At what point, exactly, can an author be said to be remembered?

Why does this matter? There are a few reasons. One is that Barbara Pym and others like her are remembered thanks to the steady, persistent work of little publishers. The authors of these would-be resurrecting essays are usually drawing on the work of other people. If you're reviewing, for instance, a book that has been republished (sometimes even translated) and sent to you, there's something ludicrous about presenting yourself as its discoverer. You didn't discover it. You appreciate it, which is a different thing altogether. Rather than being a discoverer, you join a chain of remembering.

When it comes to women writers, the forgotten label has another troublesome effect. As mentioned above, the bar for being forgotten is quite low — it presents a binary of literary fame in which you are either Jonathan Franzen or else in the trash. What this means in practice is that no matter how many cases for a woman author of middling fame are made, she'll never really make it. There will always be a vaguely defined fame and assumption of worth that she doesn't have. And these appreciative essays, instead of entering confidently assured of the worth of their subject, instead begin on the defensive. So much justification has to be done to explain why the subject is worthwhile, and so much space has to be spent defending the subject against attack, that the subject itself can only be discussed in superficial detail, and rarely as an artist. The essay's doomed from the start, because it begins by apologizing.

Still, one should not be too hard on writers here. The problem is really, in this case, with their editors, who are even more desperate for a veneer of relevance than the writers. But I question whether any of these pieces would have been less compelling had the hook of the "forgotten" been dropped altogether. If the point is really that you have something to say about a writer, about their work, then what you have to say is probably quite sayable and compelling without the whole charade that you're somehow contributing to history.

I know, I know. The only thing worse than a piece with a contrived purpose is a piece that has absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Still, there's a middle ground, where a writer can present a book or an author with an infectious enthusiasm and confidence whether it's timely or not. And if you're dealing with an author who genuinely is forgotten, then the need for this approach goes double. So to the writer of next year's Pym essay — wherever it may appear — here's my advice: Let Barbara Pym stand on her own two feet and, instead of rushing to introduce and defend her, listen to what she has to say to you.